Physicists and CERN officials dismissed the concerns, with the LHC project leader saying in 2008, "Obviously, the world will not end when the LHC switches on."

The collider is designed, however, to work at high energies. When it relaunches in November, the collider is expected to begin running at 3.5 tera-electron volts (TeV), or 3.5 trillion electron volts. It was built to move particles at twice those energies.

The accelerator is designed to smash subatomic particles into each other at high speeds in order to break them down and allow the discovery of smaller, more fundamental particles.